Tangled Threads

2

“You really don’t know that she’s here to kill you, Gin,” Finn said.

After I’d examined the dead dwarf, I’d jogged back across the street and gotten into Finn’s Escalade. He’d cranked the engine, and we’d left the docks and the mean streets of Southtown behind. Now we cruised through the downtown area on our way out to the suburbs that ringed Ashland.

The corporate sharks had long ago deserted the city’s skyscrapers and office complexes and had gone home for the evening. The only people out on the streets at this hour were the bums who hadn’t been able to find shelter for the night. A few of them huddled around trash can fires on some of the darker side alleys. Out on the main drag, vampire prostitutes wearing as little as the cold would let them trolled listlessly up and down the sidewalks, still hoping that some sugar daddy would want to get his rocks off before going back to his warm, comfortable bed. The hookers eyed Finn’s vehicle with predatory interest as he drove past, their teeth gleaming like pointed pearls underneath the harsh glare of the streetlights.

“Maybe LaFleur just wanted to stiff the dwarf to get his merchandise,” Finn added.

“So what? She waits in that shack on the dock for an hour until he moves those crates for her. Then she comes out and chats with him before she fries him with her electrical magic? I don’t think so,” I said. “The dwarf knew she was there the whole time. She was asking him if he’d seen or heard anything. If he’d seen or heard any sign of me. That’s why he shrugged. The whole thing was a setup, pure and simple.”

That was the only explanation that made sense. There was no other reason for someone of LaFleur’s reputation, skills, and magic to sit in the dark for an hour. No, she’d been paid to be there — and I knew exactly who was footing the bill.

“Are you sure it was her?” Finn asked. “LaFleur? Here in Ashland?”

I nodded. “Yeah, it was LaFleur. She’s the only assassin I know of who leaves a white orchid behind with her victims. It’s her signature. Fletcher has a whole file of information on her.”

Fletcher Lane had been the assassin the Tin Man most of his life, until I took over the business from my foster father several years ago. But Fletcher had kept up with things in his own way, including compiling information on all the other top-level assassins currently working in the trenches and those who had supposedly retired like me. Strengths, weaknesses, vices, quirks, preferred kill methods. The old man had documented everyone and everything that he could find, just in case any of the others ever became a threat to us.

It wasn’t unheard of for one assassin to be hired to take out another. A few months ago, an assassin named Brutus, aka Viper, had been sent to kill me, the Spider. I’d taken a contract to off a corporate whistle-blower, only my employer had decided to frame me for the murder instead, so she’d brought in Brutus to kill me at the scene of the crime, the Ashland Opera House. Viper — so nicknamed because of the rune tattoo of a fanged snake on his neck — had gotten the drop on me and would have killed me if he hadn’t stopped to brag about how much better an assassin he was than me. Talking. It was always the bad guy’s downfall.

I made a mental note to dig out Fletcher’s file on LaFleur. I’d seen a demonstration of her electrical elemental magic tonight, but I wanted to know what other skills she might have.

“Okay, say it was LaFleur,” Finn said. “There’s only one person she could be working for, given the fact that she was waiting there for you tonight, given whose shipment that was supposed to be at the docks.”

“Mab Monroe.” I finished his thought.

Not surprising. After all, I had declared war on the Fire elemental and her organization. But the real kicker was that a few weeks ago, I’d taken credit for killing Elliot Slater, the giant enforcer who was one of Mab’s top lieutenants. Mab couldn’t let the giant’s death slide — not and save face with the rest of Ashland’s underworld. She had to get rid of me somehow, if only to let everyone else know that she was still queen bee of the city. I’d been waiting for her to react, to make some kind of move against me, and now I knew what it was. The Fire elemental had hired LaFleur to come to Ashland and kill me.

It was a smart play. Cold, calm, logical, with a high chance for quick, lasting success. LaFleur’s ambush might have worked tonight. She might have gotten the drop on me, might even have killed me, if I’d been five minutes less patient. But I’d been trained by the very best, by the Tin Man himself. Waiting out an enemy was one of the first things that Fletcher had taught me — and it had certainly come in handy tonight.

And as much as I might hate Mab, I had to admit that the Fire elemental never did anything halfway. LaFleur was one of the best assassins in the business, and now I knew that she had elemental magic at her disposal, as well as the usual assortment of deadly skills assassins specialize in. LaFleur’s electrical power had felt just as strong as my Ice and Stone magic. So strong that I didn’t know which of us would still be standing at the end of this little game. A troubling thought, to say the least.

“But why would LaFleur kill the dwarf?” Finn asked. “Especially if they were both working for Mab?”

I shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe LaFleur was bored after having to wait so long for me not to show. Maybe all that electrical magic makes her twitchy. Maybe she just likes frying people. Her motives aren’t important. What I want to know is who set me up. Who told you about Mab’s shipment of drugs or whatever was in those boxes in the first place?”

Finn didn’t say anything for a moment. “You’re not going to like it.”

“Correction. He’s not going to like it when I get my hands on him. Now, who told you?”

Finn looked at me. “Vinnie Volga over at Northern Aggression.”

I frowned. “The Ice elemental bartender?”

He nodded. “The one and the same.”

Finn was right. I didn’t like it, mainly because I was friendly with Vinnie’s boss, Roslyn Phillips, the vampire madam who ran Northern Aggression, Ashland’s most infamous and upscale nightclub. I didn’t think that Roslyn would take too kindly to my killing her favorite bartender.

I sighed. “And just how did this information get from Vinnie’s lips to your ears? Did he tell you himself or was there a middleman involved?”

Information was the commodity that Finn traded in, and my foster brother had a network of spies throughout Ashland and beyond. Everyone from people he’d done favors for, to friends of friends, to folks looking to earn a few bucks by passing on what they knew about the city’s power players. Finn was a master at separating the wheat from the chaff, or the solid info from the smoke screens. I rarely asked him where he got his intel from, though. I trusted Finn, and that was all that mattered to me. He wouldn’t steer me wrong if he could help it.

Finn shrugged. “No middleman at all this time. I was sitting at the bar last night, chatting up all the sweet young things like usual. There was a lull in the action, so Vinnie and I started talking. He asked me if I ever, ah, imbibed something stronger than alcohol. He said he heard about some good stuff that was coming in down at the docks tonight.”

I looked at Finn. “Vinnie just blurted out that he knew when and where some drugs were coming into town? That sounds like a plant to me. Like Vinnie was spreading that line around to everyone to see who might bite on it.”

“I thought it was just bullshit myself, until the dwarf started unloading those boxes,” Finn said.

“I think we both know it’s a little more serious than that now.”

We fell silent as Finn left the downtown streets behind. The metropolis of Ashland sprawled over the corner of the Appalachian Mountains where Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia converged. The city was divided into two sections — Northtown and Southtown — held together by the circle of the downtown area.

The docks we’d just left were firmly entrenched in Southtown, the rough part of Ashland that was home to the poor, the down-on-their-luck, and the downtrodden. Southtown was the kind of place where people would slit your throat for your shoes. Anything in your wallet would just be gravy on top of that. Gangs and junkies littered the Southtown streets, along with more traditional forms of trash.

In comparison, Northtown was the rich, genteel, refined part of town, with high-end McMansions and immaculate estates that stretched out for miles. But that didn’t mean Northtown was any safer. Because the rich folks there would kill you first with kind words before they actually plunged a dagger into your back.

Middle-class suburbs with more modest homes and income levels ringed Ashland on both sides, with all the requisite schools, shops, and businesses that you’d expect to find. Which is the general direction that Finn and I were headed in now.

About ten minutes later, Finn drove his car past a massive iron gate and up a long driveway that curved by a four-story mansion. Unlike some of the others in this area close to Northtown, the home was relatively plain with a simple, sturdy, stone facade. Much like the man who lived inside. The one that I’d come here to be with this evening.

Finn grinned at me, his white teeth gleaming in the darkness. “Well, I hope you and Owen have fun on your booty call tonight, since you made me drive you all the way out here.”

The Owen that Finn was referring to was Owen Grayson, the wealthy businessman I’d recently started seeing and the owner of the mansion before me. Owen had asked me to come by this evening, if I wasn’t out too late killing Mab’s minions. Since I wasn’t covered in blood tonight as I had been for the last several, I’d decided to take him up on his offer.

“It’s not a booty call,” I muttered.

“Right,” Finn drawled. “And I’m a eunuch.”

I raised an eyebrow. “I do happen to have several sharp knives secreted on my person. So we could easily arrange that, if you really wanted to make that sort of permanent lifestyle change.”

Finn shuddered. “I’d rather be dead.”

He really would have. Finn had an appreciation for the female form that bordered on obsession. Old, young, fat, thin, blond, brunette, toothless. It didn’t matter to Finn. As long as it was breathing and female, he saw an open invitation to be charming and oh so suave.

“Be sure and say hello to Eva for me,” Finn said in a hopeful voice.

Eva Grayson was Owen’s gorgeous nineteen-year-old sister and the object of Finn’s affections whenever he saw her — or at least whenever there wasn’t some other, more accessible female in his immediate line of sight. Finn tended to have a short attention span where the ladies were concerned.

“I thought you’d sworn off college girls after that pair at Northern Aggression said you were old enough to be their father.”

“Hmph.” Finn sniffed. “I’m only thirty-two, Gin, so technically, that’s not quite accurate. I’m not that old.”

“Oh no?” I said. “You just had more than a decade on the girls you were hitting on.”

But Finn wasn’t bothered by my quip, because his grin widened. “Decade or not, it was a good thing that they had daddy issues, wasn’t it? Because I still went home with both of them.”

I rolled my eyes and punched him lightly in the shoulder. Finn just laughed.

“Seriously, though,” he said after his chuckles faded away. “What do you want to do about Vinnie and the info he leaked to me?”

“We’ll pay Vinnie a visit — tomorrow,” I said. “After we talk to Roslyn and tell her what’s going on. See what dirt you can dig up on him in the meantime. I want to know everything there is to know about Vinnie Volga before we go and brace him and see why he’s spreading rumors for Mab.”

And before I decided whether Vinnie was any kind of threat to me — and whether the bartender needed to get dead for being stupid enough to try and sell out the Spider.

Finn and I made plans to meet tomorrow and said our good nights. Then he zoomed his Escalade down the driveway to go back to his apartment in the city, leaving me alone in front of the house.

Instead of immediately going inside the mansion, I stood in the driveway. Listening, but not to the wind as it gusted through the trees that flanked the house, making them creak and crack and shudder. Instead, I tilted my head to one side and concentrated on the whispers of the gray cobblestones under my feet and the larger rocks of the mansion above my head.

People’s emotions and actions sink into their surroundings over time, especially stone. As a Stone elemental, I could hear, listen to, and interpret emotional vibrations in the element, no matter what form it took, from loose gravel underfoot to a brick house to a granite gravestone. I could tell if a home was a happy one, if blood had been spilled in a driveway, or if someone was lurking around the side of a building with dark intentions in her heart.

Tonight the stones gave off nothing but their usual, low murmurs, telling me of the winter wind that had whipped around the mansion all day and the chipmunks that had scurried from one side of the cobblestones to the other looking for shelter from the cold.

But there was more to being a Stone elemental than just listening to rocks. My magic also let me manipulate the stone. Let me tap into the element and exert my will on it any way I wanted to, from crumbling bricks to cracking concrete. I could even make my own skin as hard as marble so that nothing could penetrate it, not even another elemental’s power — a trick that had saved me more than once. And I was strong in my magic too. So strong that I could easily lash out with it and tear Owen Grayson’s mansion apart one stone at a time. It wouldn’t have been any harder for me than breathing. I knew from past experience that my elemental power would let me bring down all those lovely gray stones and grind them to dust.

After all, I’d done that very thing to my own home, the night that Mab had murdered my mother and older sister.

On that horrible night, I’d reached out with my Stone magic and leveled our whole house with it to try to get to my baby sister, Bria, in time. To try and save her before Mab found, tortured, and killed her. I’d thought that Bria had died as a result of my actions, that she’d been crushed to death by the falling stones. It was a cold, ugly, secret guilt I’d carried with me for the last seventeen years, until I’d discovered that Bria was still alive and back in Ashland.

I’d only been thirteen when I’d destroyed my own house. Now, at thirty, my magic was stronger than it had ever been before. And, according to Jo-Jo Deveraux, the dwarven Air elemental who healed me whenever I needed it, my power would only keep growing.

The thought always made me uncomfortable. Even now I shivered at the idea. My mother, Eira, had been the strongest Ice elemental that I’d known, but her magic hadn’t been enough to save her from Mab’s Fire power. Mab’s flames had washed over her — hot, hungry, and unstoppable — consuming my mother until she was nothing more than a pile of smoldering ash. So I had more than a gut feeling that my own Ice and Stone power wasn’t going to do me much good when I finally went up against the Fire elemental.

Sometimes, even assassins had qualms about dying.

I pushed my melancholy memories aside and stepped up to the front door. A knocker was mounted there — a large hammer done in hard, black iron. The symbol could also be found on the enormous gate that ringed the house and grounds.

The hammer was a rune, just like the scars on my palms. But whereas the spider runes branded into my hands symbolized patience, Owen’s hammer represented strength, power, and hard work — all things that he knew a great deal about. Owen Grayson used the hammer as his personal and business rune. A common thing in Ashland. Elementals, vampires, giants, dwarves — most of the city’s magic types used some sort of rune to identify themselves, their family, their business, or even their power.

A light burned above the front door, but I didn’t see any others on inside the house, so I decided not to use the hammer rune knocker. No need to wake everyone else up. Besides, I was used to slipping into buildings in the middle of the night. It just felt more natural to me.

I held my hand out, palm up, and reached for the Ice magic flowing through my veins. A cold, silver light flickered there, centered on the spider rune scar embedded in my palm, and a second later, I held two slender Ice picks in my hand, tools of my trade that I’d created a thousand times before.

I was the rarest of elementals — someone who could use not one but two elements. Ice and Stone, in my case. For years, my Stone magic had been the stronger of the two, due to the spider rune scars on my hands. That’s because the scars were made out of silverstone, a special metal that absorbed all forms of magic, including elemental power. Like most Ice elementals, I released my power through my hands, using it to create Ice cubes, crystals, and whatnot. But the silverstone metal in my palms had blocked the easy release of my Ice power, absorbing the magic as fast as I could bring it to bear.

Several weeks ago, I’d finally overcome the block during a fight for my life against another Stone elemental. It always surprised me how easy it was to use my Ice magic now — and how it felt stronger every time I reached for it. Jo-Jo Deveraux claimed that soon my Ice power would be just as strong as my Stone magic. Another thought that made me uneasy.

Especially since my elemental magic, my dual powers, was the reason that Mab had murdered my family in the first place.

It took me less than a minute to pick the lock. Of course, I didn’t really need to use the Ice picks at all, much less skulk around outside in the cold dark. Owen had given me a key to the door a few days ago, telling me to feel free to drop by anytime, day or night.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about having a key to a man’s home. None of my previous relationships had ever lasted long enough to get to this point. Owen and I had been together for only a few weeks, and things were moving faster than I’d thought they would between us. Then again, I wasn’t sure about a lot of things when it came to Owen Grayson.

Especially the way he made me feel.

For a moment, I stood there in front of the open door, wondering whether I really wanted to go inside. Whether I really wanted to see Owen tonight. Whether I really wanted to deal with the developing relationship and deepening emotions between us.

Me, Gin Blanco, the assassin known as the Spider, hovering outside her lover’s door like a nervous teenager trying to scrounge up enough courage to finally call that cute boy in her class. Finn would have laughed his ass off at me and my indecision. But I’d much rather face a dozen assassins like LaFleur any night than deal with something as tricky, convoluted, and fragile as my feelings.

Still, Owen had asked me to come by, and I’d told him that I would, if things didn’t get too violent and bloody on my latest hit. Emotions or not, I liked to keep my promises whenever I could, especially to Owen, who had been so good to me so far, so accepting of who I was and all the ugly things I had done — that I would do again without hesitation to protect the people I loved.

So I drew in a breath, slipped inside the house, and closed the door behind me.